Khaled Kasab Mahameed poses inside his Holocaust museum with a Palestinian flag and a cup of coffee, (coffee is a symbol of hospitality in the Palestinian curture) , June 14, 2005, in Nazareth. Khaled Kasab Mahameed, a Palestinian who has opened a Holocaust museum in Nazareth believing that if the Palestinians understood the Holocaust it would help gain peace in the Mideast , June 14, 2005, in Israel. Photographer Lacy Atkins

Photo: LACY ATKINS

Khaled Kasab Mahameed poses inside his Holocaust museum with a...

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Graffiti saying, " Palestine=One Giant Concertration camp. AFTER WWII YOU'D THINK THE JEWS WOULD BE THE LAST PEOPLE ON EARTH TO DO TO OTHER PEOPLE LIKE WHAT THE NAZIS DID TO THEM", is written on the Wall that separates the West Bank from Israel, July 6, 2005. Khaled Kasab Mahameed, a Palestinian who has opened a Holocaust museum in Nazareth believing that if the Palestinians understood the Holocaust it would help gain peace in the Mideast, July 6, 2005, in Israel. Photographer Lacy Atkins

Photo: LACY ATKINS

Graffiti saying, " Palestine=One Giant Concertration camp. AFTER...

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Khaled Kasab Mahemeed, right, with his daughter, Assil on his lap listens to his son, Jaurdat talk about his views on the Holocaust, July 6, 2005, in Nazareth. Khaled Kasab Mahameed, a Palestinian who has opened a Holocaust museum in Nazareth believing that if the Palestinians understood the Holocaust it would help gain peace in the Mideast, July 6, 2005. Photographer Lacy Atkins

Photo: LACY ATKINS

Khaled Kasab Mahemeed, right, with his daughter, Assil on his lap...

A TIME OF CHANGE: ISRAELIS, PALESTINIANS AND THE DISENGAGEMENT / Palestinian teacher of Holocaust history

2005-08-03 04:00:00 PDT Nazareth, Israel -- This is one in a Chronicle series on Israel's planned evacuation this month of approximately 9,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. The stories are told through the lives and voices of individuals touched by the conflict.

Today: An Israeli Arab who says anger at Jews is misplaced..

Like so many Palestinians, Khaled Kasab Mahameed grew up with a feeling of loss -- the loss of his family's home in Al Lajjoun in 1948, when his parents fled the war between Jews and Arabs and resettled in Um Al-Fahm in what is now the state of Israel.

But there was a difference. Although most Palestinians blame their loss during the period they call the nakba (catastrophe) on Jewish troops they say drove them from their homes -- or on Arab radio stations they say ordered them to flee while claiming the Jews were being vanquished -- Mahameed's father blamed one man.

"He used to say, 'We had to pay the price for Hitler's atrocities.' This is what he would say when I was 5," said Mahameed, now 43. "He hated the policies. (But) he didn't curse the Jewish people."

The seed planted by the father in the son has borne fruit in the form of posters, photocopies and brochures that form a mini-museum about the Nazi Holocaust in the waiting room of Mahameed's law office in Nazareth.

It's not easy to find. His office is in a nondescript white limestone building on one of the many twisted streets that curl up Nazareth's hills past the holy shrines of three religions. Children play in front, watching their ball bounce down the hill, then chasing it to a stop. Neither his office nor the museum has a sign out front.

The collection is modest, to be sure, but one that Mahameed believes is important for the Arab world -- even if the only visitors so far have been his legal clients strolling to his office, and his message is one that relatively few in the Arab world have wanted to hear.

"This is not a gimmick," said Mahameed, an Israeli Arab, whose business cards bear a stylized scale of justice with Hebrew lettering on one side, Arabic on the other.

"I'm serious. I want to get to every Arab home in the world."

In a land where many are pessimists, Mahameed is an unabashed optimist. Israel's plan to disengage from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank, for example -- viewed by many Palestinians with skepticism and faint hope at best -- is embraced by Mahameed, who hopes it "will create the mass emotions and ideas needed for both people to understand that the peace effort is worthy.

"The experience of getting out of Gaza will create a sense within both people that it is possible to do things where both sides can get benefit of it, " he said.

Mahameed's museum has left some Jewish groups apprehensive and Arab critics unconvinced. But he believes the museum is the logical outgrowth of his observation of the war of narratives between Jews and Arabs and of the memory of his father's words.

In his school history book at the Arab Orthodox College in Haifa, Mahameed said, the Holocaust was dealt with in just half a page. At Hebrew University, in 1983, when he proposed writing an essay about the Holocaust, his Jewish teacher pulled him aside and urged him to write about something else -- anything else. And as an adult, he said, he saw the effect that lack of knowledge was having on his people's political discourse.

Avoiding details

"All of the Arab leaders, every one ... know something like this: The Holocaust happened. No details. They don't want to know details," he said. "(Yet) I read every day in the Israeli papers that the Holocaust is the main thing shaping Israeli society and Israeli policy."

Mahameed's decision to try to bridge that gap wasn't immediate -- he left Hebrew University in 1984 and went to Sweden to study business administration, then returned to Israel in 1992 to study law. But last October, with materials from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority established by the Israeli Knesset, he opened his own mini-museum.

It hasn't been easy. Mahameed spent $5,000 of his own money, translating poster captions into Arabic himself and publishing 2,000 copies of his own Arabic brochures about the Holocaust, illustrated with graphic photos of Jews being murdered and their emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood in the Nazi death camps.

Stack of brochures

A stack of brochures sit in the corner of Mahameed's waiting room atop a table covered with a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headdress, and near a large Palestinian flag. He keeps a stack in the trunk of his shiny new Volvo, leaving them in public areas -- waiting rooms, libraries -- and handing out copies to people he meets, like the car salesman whom he forced to take a copy before he would discuss buying a car.

"He wanted to sell the car, so he had to listen," Mahameed said with a smile.

Others are less willing to listen or read what he has to say.

"I give them this booklet -- they just drop it. I tell them, 'You're stupid,' " he said.

Stupid, Mahameed continued, because the Arab world needs to learn about the Holocaust -- not for the benefit of the Jews, but for Arabs, and especially Palestinians opposed to the Israeli occupation.

"Fighting is not just throwing bombs. Fighting is also understanding the basis of power of your enemy," he said. "And part of that is the Holocaust.

"It's the only way to bring peace to the Palestinians -- not the Jewish people, the Palestinians."

Mahameed explains his theory in several ways.

For one, he says, ignorance and denial of the Holocaust -- still widespread in the Arab world -- is both irrational and self-defeating. Holocaust denial, in particular, can only serve to discredit the Palestinian cause in the rest of the world's eyes, he believes.

In May, a Gaza imam was severely criticized for his remarks on Palestinian television accusing Jews of grossly inflating the number killed in the Holocaust.

To Mahameed, who believes 6 million -- or more -- Jews died in the death camps, such statements serve no purpose.

What difference does it make, he asks, if the number is true or false? So long as the rest of the world accepts it -- and supports Israel, in part, out of guilt and revulsion over the Holocaust -- the Arab world harms its interests by denying it.

In the same vein, Mahameed has little patience for Palestinians who insist he put up pictures from the nakba -- the catastrophe, which is how the majority of Palestinians regard the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the establishment of the state of Israel -- or who compare Israel's actions in the occupied territories to the Nazis' acts in World War II.

"I know what the nakba is. The nakba is not the Holocaust," he said firmly. "It's not fair to make the comparison, because it hurts the Palestinian cause."

Mahameed's proposed alternative -- one he has made in public and in print -- has startled both Jews and Arabs.

"We have to adopt the Holocaust."

Mahameed explains that the Arab world must not only accept that the Holocaust happened but integrate the Holocaust into the Arab narrative. Only then, he said, can the Arab world negotiate with Israel with a shared understanding of their mutual wants and needs.

"If I understand the Holocaust, it strengthens my rights in this land," he said. "If the Arabs come to the Jewish people and say, 'We have to secure your existence so another Holocaust doesn't happen,' the Jewish people will say we don't have to worry about this land."

Mahameed's concept takes him beyond the realm of politics, into a scenario where he imagines 42 million Arabs sitting shiva -- the traditional Jewish seven-day mourning period when a close relative has died -- for the 6 million Jewish victims of Hitler. He does not worry that the Arab schools he has approached have so far declined to visit his museum, saying his true intended audience is the leaders of the Arab world.

It's quite an ambition. Quixotic, even. He firmly shakes his head at the comparison. Don Quixote was a skinny old man at the end of his adventure, he said, while Mahameed is still young, stocky, energetic -- and just beginning his quest.

Nevertheless, his passion is comparable, according to his wife, Ezdehar, the mother of their two children. Ezdehar said she questioned the value of the museum when Mahameed came up with it about four years ago, but her husband wore her down.

"He began to talk to me, every night, 10 o'clock," she said. "He began to tell us -- the children and me -- and we felt we had to learn more about the Holocaust."

After a family visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, and many more conversations, Ezdehar said, she became a believer -- even though the idea has caused screaming fights with her brother and caused Mahameed's own brother to stop talking to him.

"They're not killing ideas. You can get freedom without killing, without blood on the street from Israelis and Palestinians," she said. "Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in a month, maybe not in a year. But someday, he will get this idea to all the people in the world."

His view that European guilt over the Holocaust has helped bolster support for Israel -- something he calls "legitimate and justified," even if it comes at the expense of the Palestinian cause -- has raised eyebrows in some Jewish quarters, including the Anti-Defamation League.

In a March press release based on comments on Mahameed's Web site -- www.alkaritha.org -- the Anti-Defamation League warned that if Mahameed's museum is "ideologically grounded in the belief that it was the Palestinian people who paid the price for European guilt over the Holocaust by imposing what they believe is an illegitimate Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world," then it would "merely propagate the classic anti-Israel use of the Holocaust and promote anti-Semitism."

Museum visitor

But after a visit to the museum in June, Kenneth Jacobson, the organization's senior associate national director, came away impressed with the man and the museum.

"It's a very good initiative," Jacobson said in a telephone interview with The Chronicle.

"He really does believe it's important for Israeli Arabs and other Arabs, that in order to understand the Jews, you have to understand the Holocaust."

Some of Mahameed's Arab neighbors -- even those who claim a comfortable relationship with the Jews in the mixed city of Nazareth -- have been more critical.

"Let's say Palestinians understand what happened to Jews in Germany. How does that change how the Palestinians feel about the Jews?" asked Abas Fahoum, 24, a Haifa University student who sat puffing on a nargila, a traditional Arab pipe, in downtown Nazareth.

"It happened long ago ... let's focus on what's happening today," he said. "Maybe history will show (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon was worse than Hitler."

Mahameed shrugs off the barbs.

"They curse me," he said. "But they are thinking about the Holocaust."

Some in the Arab community support him privately even if they won't say so publicly, he said. And he still hopes to get financing to expand his dream with a second museum in Um Al-Fahm, where his family settled after 1948.

"They told me they will burn it. But I don't believe it," he said. "Every Palestinian is waiting to know about the Holocaust. It's a matter of time. I'm waiting to do it."